“I don’t think I could have done that, no matter how much I would have wanted to.”
“I don’t know. Maybe not. Maybe I need to do it myself. I know I need to get rid of all this bitterness. And after last night, I feel less mad, so there’s that.”
“That’s a start,” I said. “A good start.”
“But I need to get rid of my hope, too. About us, I mean.” He paused and took a breath. “So I’m asking once and for all: Is there any hope for us?”
I waited for the urge to reassure him, to say whatever would make him happy, but it didn’t come. “No,” I said.
I heard him exhale. “Ouch. But okay. I won’t wait for you, then, not even in the back of my mind.”
“I’m rooting for you, though,” I said. “I always will be.”
“Thanks.” He gave a wry laugh. “Maybe one day, I’ll be able to say the same about you.”
“I’ll understand if you can’t,” I said.
“Yeah, but I probably will.”
“Knowing you,” I said, smiling.
“Hey, you know what else?”
“What?”
“I feel less mad at Ro, too. I didn’t really see that coming, but it’s true.”
“I’m glad.”
“Who knows? I might even look for her.”
“Good luck, Zach,” I said.
“Good-bye, Clare,” said Zach.
* * *
We couldn’t see Edith’s house from the curvy, pothole-pocked, wood-lined country road, so we parked the car near her mailbox, and I held Dev’s hand, and we walked together down the long gravel driveway. The driveway was narrow, barely one car wide, and the trees stood so thick on both sides that we walked through a twilight dimness. As we got closer, I could see radiant glimpses of green lawn and the aluminum foil shine of the lake through the trees, and just before we got to the spot where the gravel gave way to grass and the world filled with light, Dev said, “It’s always been you, too.”
I smiled and pressed a kiss onto the smooth back of his hand, and we broke free from the trees and were standing in Edith’s yard, dazzled by sun and by the glittering water, and by just being together and there. I might have stood all day with Dev, breathless, blinking in the light, prickles sparking along the insides of my arms, but a dog started barking, and Dev pointed toward the house and said, “Look.”
The house was small and modern, all honey-colored wood and windows, with a stone chimney and a deck wrapping around. An old green Jeep Cherokee was parked on the grass behind it. The front of the house faced the water, but from where we stood, I could see what I thought must be the kitchen door, a screen door at which bounced and spun a white barking mop of dog. For one crazy second, I thought, She’s here. Edith is alive after all and she has a dog.
“Someone’s home,” said Dev.
“I guess someone bought the house after Edith died. Of course, that would have happened,” I said.
“Why don’t we knock?” said Dev. “Maybe the people living here would let us take a look around.”
We walked around the side of the house, climbed the deck steps, and knocked on the front door.
A man answered, elderly, tall and thin, with the kind of pure white hair you know used to be blond. He wore khaki pants, white sneakers, and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up.
“Hello?” he said and before we could say anything else, the polite smile faded from his face, and, in a hushed voice, he uttered the most amazing thing: “You’re Clare.” Then, looking at Dev, he said, “And I’m betting you’re Dev.”
“You’re right,” I said, awestruck. “But how did you know?”
The man stepped out onto the deck and offered me his hand to shake.
“My name is John,” he said.
“She wanted to come back to Antioch Beach so that she could visit me,” he told us.
Dev and I sat on a leather sofa in John’s house, the beamed ceiling soaring above us and the butter-yellow sunlight flooding in on three sides. Fitzy, the dog, sat at my feet.
“But even though by then the police had stopped looking for her, I worried that if she came back, they’d have no choice but to at least bring her in for questioning. She had her fresh start, hard won as it was, and I wanted her to keep it. But she wrote me every week for four years, and even though she wasn’t with me, she was. Just knowing she was out there, waiting for me, made me less alone. When I got out of prison, I packed up everything I owned and came to find her.”
He leaned back in his chair, looked around at the walls covered with beautiful black-and-white photographs, and sadness crossed his face like the shadow of clouds passing over water. He smiled. “We were married fifty-three years.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said.
“Me, too,” said Dev.
“Thank you,” said John. “We knew when she got diagnosed that she didn’t have long, just six months or so, and she decided she wanted to find you before she died. We plotted and schemed, and then she found the engagement announcement with your wedding date in some online newspaper, and it all fell into place.”
“Why do you think she didn’t just tell Clare who she was?” asked Dev.
John cocked his head, thinking.
“I’m not so sure. She did promise Gareth she’d never get in touch with Martin, and not because Gareth made her promise. She wanted Martin to be happy, not to be torn between two sets of parents. She never stopped missing him, not for a single day, and she just kept up with him from afar as best she could. His death hit her hard. It was a dark day when we found out about that. Afterward, she kept up with you, Clare.”
“I’m glad,” I said. “I’m so glad.”
“You know, even though she’d made that promise, she might have told you who she was the weekend of your wedding. She didn’t go there with a plan, but she said she might tell you. So many years had gone by—decades—since she’d made that promise. But then she found you and talked to you and decided to leave you Blue Sky House instead.”
Slowly, I nodded. “I think I understand that,” I said.
“You broke off your engagement, I guess,” said John, with a grin.
“I did. It was the right thing. Edith is the one who helped me see that.”
“She thought you would.”
“How did you know Dev was Dev?” I asked.
John’s eyes twinkled. “Edith told me she met Dev and saw you two together. In my experience, Edith’s faith is almost never misplaced, and she said she had faith that you’d find your way home.”
We talked for hours, until all the windows went dark. John told us about Edith’s job as a nurse at the camp in the summertime and about how, using just the initials E.H.W., she sold her photographs in galleries, sometimes for breathtaking sums of money. He told us how he’d trained to become an accountant in prison and how, after all that had happened, spending his days in the cool, abstract company of numbers was a relief. He had changed his last name to Smith when he left Antioch Beach and kept it even after he and Edith got married.
“But that was only on paper,” he said. “In our private, everyday lives, we went by the same name.”
Edith and John had spent the last nearly five and a half decades being John and Edith Waterland.
When we were leaving, he hugged me and kissed me on the temple and asked us to please keep in touch, to come back anytime. I told him that he was my grandfather, the only one I had ever had, and that I wasn’t about to let go of him.
Afterward, when Dev and I were sitting in the car, just before we left Edith and John’s house, Dev said, “You told John you thought you understood why Edith just gave you her house without telling you who she was. Do you think she knew what would happen?”
“I only know what I feel,” I said. “I feel like she knew everything. Like she made everything happen, every single thing leading up to right now, this very moment.”
“The two of us sitting in this car together in front of her house???
?
“Yes.”
“And what about the next moment and the one after that?” asked Dev, twining his fingers in my hair.
I recognized the excitement billowing in his voice, as if our future together would be the most fun in the world, one adventure after the next. Who was I to resist excitement like that?
Oh, this here and now, this particular snapshot fragment of forever. Dev talking to me, his face lighting up the darkness: one more thing to carry, to bring with me wherever I went.
“I think she would say the rest is up to us,” I said.
Acknowledgments
My heartfelt thanks to the following:
Jennifer Carlson, my above-and-beyond agent, for her brilliance, friendship, and faith in my work (even when my own falters);
Jennifer Brehl, my lovely editor, for her dead-on instincts and uncanny ear for language;
all the extraordinary folks at William Morrow, especially Andrew DiCecco; Lynn Grady; Jennifer Hart; Kaitlyn Kennedy; Tavia Kowalchuk; Nate Lanman; Andy LeCount, Carla Parker, Mary Beth Thomas, and the entire sales team; Bonni Leon-Berman; Elsie Lyons; Laurie McGee; Julia Meltzer; and Liate Stehlik;
Carolyn Ring, who gave me invaluable help in researching 1950s life (and museums and laws and beach towns and hairstyles);
my friends, who rescue me with conversation over and over, especially Lynda Arai, Karen Ballotta Garman, Sherry Brilliant, Maureen Buzdygon, Mark Caughey, Susan Davis, Susie Davis, Susan Finizio, Linda Jaworski, Theresa Proud, and Karen Taormina;
Mary and Arturo de los Santos, for being a sanctuary all my life;
my dogs, Huxley and Finny, twelve pounds of pure sunshine;
Charles and Annabel, who crack me up, fill me with wonder, and are my blue sky every single second;
and, as always, David Teague, my best everything and the one who has looked like home to me from the very first day.
About the Author
MARISA DE LOS SANTOS is a New York Times bestselling author and award-winning poet with a PhD in literature and creative writing. She lives in Wilmington, Delaware, with her family.
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Also by Marisa de los Santos
The Precious One
Falling Together
Belong to Me
Love Walked In
By Marisa de los Santos and David Teague
Connect the Stars
Saving Lucas Biggs
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
i’ll be your blue sky. Copyright © 2018 by Marisa de los Santos. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Elsie Lyons
Cover photograph © Valentino Sani / Trevillion Images
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-243193-6
Digital Edition MARCH 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-243195-0
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Marisa de los Santos, I'll Be Your Blue Sky
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